James Webb is less well known as a writer than as President Reagan's feisty and effective ex-Marine Secretary of the Navy. Yet every serious reader ought to read his rather misleadingly titled "Born Fighting" (Broadway Books, 2004). The present writer was serendipitously drawn to it by its subtitle: "How the Scots-Irish Shaped America."

For the Scotch-Irish (to use the older, and in these parts still preferred, form) are a subject of serious and abiding interest. Most "Old Stock" Americans (including this one) are at least part Scotch-Irish; yet, as Webb points out, no ethnic group, certainly none so large and influential, has been less self-conscious, less obsessed with trumpeting its identity. The Scotch-Irish, more than any others, prefer to be just "Americans." Likely their success with that ambition explains their anonymity. That's "identity" enough for them; they need no "ethnicity" crutch.

Like the Appalachians, the Ozarks were settled overwhelmingly by the Scotch-Irish. Yet ask the deepest-dyed Ozarker who the Scotch-Irish are, and odds are you'll get the answer, "Gee, I dunno. Must be a cross between the Scotch and the Irish." Their ancestors would be ashamed of their amnesia. The Scotch-Irish (so known only in America) were the English-speaking Protestant Lowland Scots settled in Northern Ireland by the British government as a counterweight to the "other," Gaelic Catholic Irish: the so-called "Ulster Plantation" the consequences of which still echo in our newspapers.

Finding themselves as oppressed by the English as were the Catholic Irish, many of them moved on to America in the years 1700-1775. Easier coastal regions being already occupied by their old English nemeses, they made for the frontier, there to become the quintessential pioneering warrior types, from Daniel Boone to George S. Patton and beyond.

Webb's thesis, transcending the racial question, is that the Scotch-Irish were (and are yet) a unique culture, an "innate republicanism" that sprang up in an aristocratic, feudal world, out of roots deep in the turbulent tribal society of the English- Scottish borderland.

(This reviewer agrees, except where Webb calls the tribes in question "Celts." Seven out of eight Scots are Lowlanders. And the Lowlanders are descendants of the Angles, as in "Anglo Saxon." The "Celtic" or Gaelic Highlander name for Lowlanders is "Sassenach," i.e. "Saxons."

And according to historian David Hackett Fischer, the Ulster Scots knew themselves as "Scotch Saxons." But it's a small difference that doesn't alter the overall point.) No people in world history, says Webb, have more fiercely resisted domination, whether by English kings (on either side of the Atlantic), by Yankees (in 1861-65), by the "Eastern elite" or "Washington establishment" nowadays. The "culture war" is in a sense just the continuation of this people's 2000-year-long resistance to control from above or afar.

The "red states" of the recent election, Webb asserts, are those in which the Scotch-Irish "shaped" society, whether by original settlement (the heart of the South) or the later diffusion of descendants and their culture (the Midwest and mountain West). Despite their historical antagonism, Scotch-Irish Americans are now indistinguishable from English Americans; and wherever they've differed in ideals, it's the Scotch-Irish ones that have won out, starting with Scotch-Irish Andrew Jackson's populist, individualist, egalitarian presidency in 1828.

Think about it: Bill Clinton, as Scotch-Irish and Southern as they come, however "scalawag," could carry the red states. John Kerry, tarred with New England blue, whether of blood or just noses, couldn't.

To Scotch-Irish-tinged Middle America George Bush came across as one's own kind of guy-- modest, unpretentious, no egghead, but with heart very much in the right place -- who'd lived down his own "Eastern elite" stigma, and who for all his shortcomings must be supported as at least "the lesser of two evils."

Democrats handily carried the red states before they replaced the Republicans as the party of minding other people's business, that most mortal sin to Scotch-Irish-formed individualist Americans, whether committed by Abolitionist or Reconstruction Republicans in Civil War days or Big-Brother Democrats today.

Scotch-Irish cultural influence is so vast and pervasive as to be virtually invisible. It's the forest that can't be seen for the trees: "trees" including such whole subcultures as trucking, country-and-western music, NASCAR racing, nonunion blue-collars, neo-Confederates, Reagan Democrats, fundamentalist and evangelical Christians; all those folks at which the "Eastern elite" so loves to sneer: the girl with "big hair" who dares to get crossways of their pet scalawag; the C-student president who lacks the gift of gab, and (gasp) actually prays! The essence of the historical Scotch-Irishman and his cultural children may look like simple contrariness, cussedness. Scolded that he can't or shouldn't do this or that, he resentfully bows his neck and (perhaps even against his own self-interest) sets about doing it! Not because he wants to necessarily, but just to prove the point: that he's a free man, free to do just what he pleases, not what somebody else pleases, even what everybody else pleases.

Efforts to rein in the individualism of such super-individualists are self-defeating.

This contrariness might be better defined as the spirit of personal autonomy and integrity. Let others bow down before "top-down" masters and superiors, self-appointed "experts," benign little bureaucratic Hitlers. These folks will give their respect and allegiance only to "bottom-up" leaders risen from their own ranks, individuals who've proved themselves and their right to lead, to command loyalty, through acts of courage, moral or physical.

"Blue-staters" (likelier to be pacifists) will be turned off by Webb's grounding of all virtue in the martial virtues; indeed just by the word "fighting" in his title.

The point being, the latter puts a higher value on those much-scomed intangibles, the likes of courage and integrity and even honor; a higher value perhaps even than on life itself.

It's hardly surprising that many more military volunteers come from the "red states."